Since FF57 upgrade many add-ons on FF are either dead , being worked on or have gone to other browsers like palemoon , sea monkey , waterfox etc

Having now connected to VEF with slow connections and mobile dongles with bandwidth limits there are certain unwanted things you will experience if you dont take precautions

On VEF a post can contain up to 125 thumbs (correction - now 150 thumbs - kudos to G-Type)

Dial-up 56k and downwards

At these speeds you really are hamstrung and need to seriously consider
blocking all the images , ads , avatars , signatures. and avoiding moving gifs

Then you have a bit of control over

- how long it takes pages to load
- how much bandwidth your using up

The first place that will help is your USER CP
Located top left under the VEF lady

After entering - on your left - you select options - under setting
- half way down the page thread displays - visible post elements

Then you untick what you wish to avoid - avatars , signatures
& images (other option is to leave this checked and block images in your browser)

Changing the number of pages from default 10 to 5 worthwhile or

If your heading into general discussion / non-content areas up to 40 per page

Mobile Dongle

Unlike dial-up the speed here isnt the main issue but the bandwidth limita with todays large posts of up to 150 thumbs at 5-10k x 10-50 posts can eat away very quickly at your limit.

To that end rather than turning off images altogether using add-ons in your browser
which can be turned on and off easily is worth exploring as it allows threads to load quickly.

Then you can select individual posts - right click the number of the post - open in a new tab
- turn off the image blocker and refresh page - only downside to this is a lot of most image posts come with no text but if your after the videos in a thread this speeds the process up.

Firefox has one called image block
Image Block adds a toggle button that conditionally blocks/allows loading of images on webpages. The toggle button is added to the navigation toolbar (extreme right) by default. Blocking images results in faster browsing, especially helpful on handheld devices or slower connections like GSM/GPRS/EDGE dial-up etc

If graphics are not an important consideration, for extremely fast page load times nothing beats the Lynx browser. I find K-Meleon to have some very fast page loads. I have not done a thorough comparison, but in the graphical browser arena it is one of the fastest and most memory and CPU efficient.

Websites and web pages are constantly growing in size and today it’s not unusual for the average page to be a few Megabyte in size. There are even websites around with single pages in the tens of Megabytes. While this might not be a major issue for people with a fast or unlimited internet, there’s still a huge proportion of people that don’t have a reasonable speed internet connection.

If you include people using mobile broadband dongles or metered internet connections it becomes a major issue and a drain on bandwidth when pages are not properly optimized.

Optimizing a web page can be as simple as compressing images and using HTML code and scripts that have no unnecessary code. The page will load faster for everybody especially for those on slower connections because less data needs to be downloaded.

Opera is very well known in this field and has had page compression in Opera and Opera Mini for a long time, it was one of the first to enable the bandwidth saving compression feature in mobile browsers. They also have an Android app called Opera Max that offers media compression across other apps on your device.

2. UCBrowser

UCBrowser is a very popular and well known mobile browser with hundreds of millions of downloads to its name. UCWeb also have a PC version of their browser based on Chromium

3. Yandex Browser

Yandex Browser is based on Chromium and integrates a feature that enables page compression, which is a modified version of Opera’s own Turbo mode

Final Note: As you might expect mileage with this type of function will vary greatly from site to site and it depends mostly on how well the site you visit has been optimized that will decide how much bandwidth saving there will be.

For example, Raymond.cc has a number of optimizations to serve pages as quickly as possible to all users, so a bandwidth saver would not produce much saving.

Other sites will get big savings because they aren’t well optimized, somewhere like TMZ.com can be compressed by over 50% saving several Megabytes on a single web page.

Expanded picture reviews , direct links which are tested with virus total before linking you
& a few user comments

As for Microsoft’s browsers, Internet Explorer users can turn off GIFs completely by going to Internet options > Advanced and unchecking Play animations in webpages. Once you restart your PC, Internet Explorer stops playing GIFs.

Edge, Microsoft’s newest browser, currently doesn’t have a way to stop GIFs, but maybe someone will make a browser extension for it in the future.

How to Stop GIFs From Auto-Playing in Your Browser
BY ERIC GRIFFITH 16 JUN 2017, 4:51 A.M.
Hate visiting a Web page and being inundated with animations you didn't want to play? Here's how to stop the GIFs!

firefox , chrome , opera , ie , safari , facebook/twitter

You'd think the same things would work for Microsoft Edge in Windows 10. But you'd be wrong. I couldn't find any easily identifiable option to shut off GIFs.

These text-only sites — which used to be more popular in the early days of the Internet, when networks were slower and bandwidth was at a premium – are incredibly useful, and not just during natural disasters.

They load much faster, don’t contain any pop-ups or ads or autoplay videos, and help people with low bandwidth or limited Internet access.

They’re also beneficial for people with visual impairments who use screen readers to navigate the Internet.